City Lodge Hotels.
City Lodge Hotels needed a full website to match its rebrand. We redesigned the marketing, content, account and booking experience across 100+ screens, supported by a 3,000+ component design system.
The problem
City Lodge’s rebrand needed a mobile-ready digital platform, not just a better booking flow
City Lodge Hotels had completed an extensive rebrand, but its website belonged to an earlier era. The underlying technology was ageing, the experience was not designed for mobile and the booking journey did not inspire much confidence. Marketing pages, articles, company information and account journeys all needed to work as one coherent platform.
The audience ranged from local to international travellers, each trying to discover a hotel, explore its offer, book or manage a stay quickly. Behind those tasks sat a booking engine, existing technology constraints and a broad set of stakeholders with different ideas about the problem. We needed to turn those inputs into one clear experience over a 1-year design programme.
The outcome
We led the UX and UI design end to end, designing more than 100 screens and creating a comprehensive design system with more than 3,000 components. The work covered the public marketing website, articles, company and hotel information, My Account and the booking flow. The booking journey follows familiar industry patterns, meets AA accessibility standards and gives travellers clear ways to correct a mistake instead of trapping them in a dead end.
The website launched with more than 1.9 million sessions in its first year and more than 80,000 successful bookings. Rage clicks represented only 0.23% of recorded interactions. We have continued the work after launch with separate desktop and mobile UX audits, then used the findings to iterate the experience.
How we got there
Align the problem
We ran design workshops to turn stakeholder input, brand ambition and the booking-engine constraints into a shared view of the real user problems.
Redesign the booking experience
We mapped and designed the marketing, content, account and booking journeys around mobile behaviour, accessibility and recoverable mistakes.
Build the system
We created the design system and 100+ responsive screens needed to apply the new experience consistently across the site.
Audit and improve
After launch, we completed dedicated UX audits for desktop and mobile, then continued to iterate the live experience.